


of the seeds we do not speak

by bioluminesce



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Eye Trauma, Gen, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26562790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: Kass had almost reached Eris beneath the silver tree when she collapsed.“You have held the Seed too long,” said Eris, shouting, at a distance and running closer.(Or, How My Guardian Loses An Eye, Or, When Artifacts Don't Just Disappear Neatly When The Season Is Over)
Relationships: Female Guardian & Eris Morn
Comments: 15
Kudos: 22





	of the seeds we do not speak

Kass had almost reached Eris beneath the silver tree when she collapsed.

The blades of grass came into minute focus, their sharp edges and green-shading-to-yellow far more important than the Ghost suddenly whipping around her in a frantic orbit. The horizon was somewhere behind the grass, the sky a blur of blue and gold and silver.

Nothing had been unusual about this mission to intercept Eris’ messages from the Darkness. Kass had been using Solar fire, controlled and precise, her sword reaping like a scythe. All that energy directed out at the amorphous shells of the Taken, none at all at the people she loved — and what a relief, what glory in her own power. She knew its limits and its excesses, its ashes and fire.

She knew the yellow grass, and a dim sensation of wet mud against her shoulder.

“I can’t change it back. I’m trying. I’m trying!” Ghost sounded more agitated than Kass felt. Her fear was cold and brittle, the rushing sound in her ears easily explained by — Oh, it wasn’t a sound at all. It was pain, so sudden and strong and merciful and familiar she had thought it something else. Pressure-pain, like a stormfront coming in, crowded in and around her eyes.

Now it _did_ hurt, enough for her to scream and curl. She dug a clawed hand into the dirt. Cold wind stirred the meadow in front of the Cradle as she stubbornly tried to pretend the pain wasn’t there. It insisted too much.

“You have held the Seed too long,” said Eris, shouting, at a distance and running closer.

“I’m sorry,” Kass said, and heard the words echoed as Eris said them too, and shut her eyes for just a second.

* * *

Eris carried the Guardian to her camp beneath the tree, and set her on the cot. Free from her protective trap, Eris would have had a difficult afternoon to look forward to if the Guardian had simply come and gone. Her research could not sustain her alone. Learning to cook had taken up her time and provided her an interest in something, but that spark was still too often missing. The tree became dull or repulsive, the Taken exhausting, her shoulders heavy. Having someone to care for washed the dullness away and presented her with intriguing problems, questions, sensations. She felt lighter.

And Kass was heavy, armored and armed. Eris hesitated with her gloved hand trapped between the thin pillow and the back of the Guardian’s red and bronze helmet, where she had eased her head down.

Ghost whirred back and forth, his blue shell pulling apart and retracting in quick snaps. “What’s happening? Her Light was under control. What is it about the Seed? We’ve had it for months. If I had known —”

“It is not your fault, little light. But she carried a burden. The Seed is fecundity itself, growth itself. An uncharitable person might call it cancerous.” She met the Ghost’s lens. “Remove her helmet and weapons. Give me the Seed of Silver Wings.”

The Ghost did. The Guardian’s chopped-short blonde hair fell lightly between Eris’ fingers as she saw a face pitted with what at first she thought were scabs. As so many things were, in Eris’ life, the pattern was beautiful and terrible. She recognized the material among the blood from the bark of Ruinous Effigy, fine-grained white wood thread with brown and bronze.

Thirteen teardrop pips had broken through Kass’ pale skin, welling with blood. Six across her cheekbones could have been decorative if they had not been gory. Five above her eyebrows inscribed a crown. Two pressing against her eyelids from below, one diamond corner showing through below twitching skin. They marred the green paint slashes of the tattoo she had been born with. Bright red blood tracked in a thin stream down her cheek in a curve. Eris’ ichor-washed cheeks prickled in sympathetic strain.

“Did you know?” The Ghost warbled. “I tried to stop it, but it’s like I can’t reach her.”

“I did not know.” Eris slipped her hand from under the Guardian’s head and examined the Seed in her opposite palm. It had closed over its glowing core, and the outside was both flaky and slick, like a holographic projection of a peel over a solid surface. “The Seed has become too strongly connected to her.”

What to do? What plan would stop this? What task Eris had completed decades ago would prove relevant again? She remembered Willbreaker, and the Void at its core. The most cursed object the Hive had made, and she and Kass had purified it. They had made it a sword as well as a shield capable of protecting Guardians from the concentrated energy of Crota’s pure and potent soul. There had been Darkness in that too, in a way, and Void, with its emptiness, had eaten it all up.

That could work.

“I know magic, not surgery,” she told the Ghost over the Guardian’s low, clench-jawed scream and the rushing sound her panicked brain falsely fed her ears. “You have to do the repairs. I will make sure they do not grow back. And she must wash them with Void Light.”

* * *

  
Kass could not open her eyes under the tree. Silver branches should have been visible above her, intertwined like jeweled chains. Instead her eyes were full of sand or dirt, everything grainy and crackling. She saw in blurry slivers of gold and white. Her face hurt terribly, and when she winced and tensed it hurt even more. Chunks of pain had been driven into her forehead, her eyes, across her cheekbones.  
  
“One Void burst,” Eris said, her voice deep with conviction and command as well as the all-encompassing kindness an elder might show a child.

“What-what’s happening?” The more Kass tried to move, the more the pain in her eyes worsened. Something clamped down on both her wrists.

“It’s okay.” The voice of Ghost reassured her, helped her breathe through the panic. She didn’t falter under fire, and she would not here, but taking her sight was a personal and debilitating torture. Eris, of all people, would know what to do —

“Forget your eyes.”

 _Bring me their eyes_ , Eris had once said to her, in another Tower, many lives ago.

“Remember the Light. Create one Void energy burst. Then, it will be over.”

Coming from Eris being ‘over’ implied dusty graves, ancient alien monuments lost to time. Surrender was death. But a Void lash was not surrender. Kass tried to hold her eyes still, but even under closed lids her eyes insisted on moving. Void. Not the Light she used the most, and one she found more difficult to grasp. By nature it was frictionless, touched by nothingness. Another deep breath, sand in her eyes.

She tried to shunt the pain away. Guardians were used to firefights; they were not, as a rule, used to pain. With Ghosts it usually didn’t last long. She breathed deep, acknowledged the pain existed but would not hold her down forever, and summoned the Void.

Making sure it was _not_ an attack was also an alien idea. She considered how to wrap the Void around herself, how to dissipate the killing cold at the same time as she created it, how to take it like a thanatonaut.

She wasn’t, and she didn’t have to. As soon as the Light rose Eris did something. Kass could not tell what. The Void dropped away from her like a cliff edge, and her eyes burned, and she felt something like the buzz of resurrection.  
  


* * *

Eris had arrayed her tools arcane and mundane around her. When she was done she set them aside, bloody pins to be cleaned and drained crystals to be recharged.

“Go quickly,” she said to the Ghost, and he reset and regrew and restitched his partner. Eris looked away in an unnameable shame. Instead, she ran her hands over her talismans and needles and the Ahamkara bone.

In the end, the Ghost could not complete his task.

The garden from the beginning of time fought for its … Survival was not the right word, Eris thought. By nature, the garden was endless continuity. It could no more stop existing in a meaningful way than time could. Like time, it was a landscape created from infinite points of reference. It had existed before time.

One piece of it stayed with the Guardian. Perhaps, Eris thought, she had been wrong to give Kass the Seed. Would she not have, if she had known it would stay forever? Had she known, the Ghost had asked, and it had been the most important question.

Eris watched the Ghost try to stop the slice of wood that grew into the Guardian’s left eye. She watched with disgust and fascination and sympathy, remembering the pulp of her own changed face. Blue holographic lines of Light danced across the closed eyelid as blood and bark welled.

No one had sat beside Eris in the pit. Those who had cared for her afterward, Ikora and Kass, had tried, but they had always had to leave, something calling them away. The Guardians who visited Eris in the old Tower had, even if they were sympathetic, simply not understood she needed _more_. She was a black hole of need, and there would be no end to it. Or so it felt. 

Eventually, she reached out to the Ghost, and with his agreement crafted a new talisman or a new seal. They could not save the eye, not with the stubborn silver growth, but they could restrict the growth and leave Kass asleep until it was all done, the blood washed off her face.

Eris stared at her fire, exhausted by the surgery she had never been meant to do. It felt momentous that she had performed for someone else a ritual like the one with which she had reshaped her own eyes. But revelation bred no change, and there was nothing to be done with the feeling.

She walked back to Kass and asked the Ghost to wake her up.

In place of the Guardian’s green eye was a flat oval of white wood, carefully and comfortably shaped, and sightless. Brassy grain flowed through it. Occasionally the bronze grain became darker or more golden, as the force inside attempted to get out. Kass hunched her broad shoulders under her scarlet cloak, and then with visible effort relaxed herself and looked around.

“The Seed. Where is it?” She raised her hands to her eyes and rubbed both aggressively.

Eris struggled to separate her own experiences from Kass’. The (former) Guardian felt the new shape of her face for the first time, outlining the (weeping third eye) smooth, wooden surface. Her eyelid was gone, her (own mad surgery) Ghost’s struggles unable to restore its delicate function. For a moment Eris couldn’t answer.

Eris reminded herself where she was. She could smell grass which had grown verdant and then been trampled, and the rich dirt underneath.

She began to explain.

* * *

Kass tried to blink her left eye and could not. The Tree loomed above her, the shimmering ceiling making her throat close as if she was drowning. She winced against the pain in her face. It radiated out of her eye, dappled down her cheeks. With difficulty, she focused on Eris, the loose leather and some other material — bone, maybe? — of Eris’ cowl cinched tight around her head. Kass’ gaze wouldn’t easily hold. It darted to the bright water, the silver bark, Ghost’s blue shell.

So, of all the strange objects she had held, the Seed had been the one that had truly been cursed. Her left side had simply gone dark. On the right everything seemed flat, accented only by confounding shadows.

Eris stood in front of her, leaning close. Her three eyes were wide and steady behind the black ichor-soaked veil. “I will not say you were brave, as so many well meaning souls told me. You held on. You did not die. You are still ... Ghost?” Eris straightened up, holding her glowing Ahamkara shard.

"Yes?"

"Is she still immortal?"

"Oh, yes, certainly."

With that, Eris Morn's present knowledge and duty of practical comfort was exhausted. Grateful for her presence but knowing she didn’t like to be touched, Kass reached out and stopped before her hand could touch Eris’ arm. With the other hand she shielded her painful eye. Uselessly, but it helped.

“I saw … the Black Garden. Or a memory … so strong it was like I was there.” Speaking made Kass feel stronger. Just knowing she had breath was enough for her to grasp all the lifelines Ikora and other mentors had given her: walking meditations, mindsets where she could categorize thoughts and set them lightly aside where they might otherwise have become overwhelming. A tickle of lightning down her back; she felt like this in the Stormtrance, and she would always have the Light.

“The seed from that Garden is part of me now. The ancient heart I saved from the Vex when I was hardly a week old … it’s always been aboutthe Garden.” She winced and rubbed her eye. “But it feels … wrong. I didn’t want this! ”

Eris didn’t respond.

Kass took another deep breath, embraced another mystery. She would have to ask Ikora about it. She would … investigate, because she was a Warlock. Gradually, she moved her hand from shielding her wound and touched the smooth surface. Her eyelid was gone. The wood was indented only as far as the highest point of her eyeball, perfectly flat, not flaking. When she drew her hand away she felt better, cleaner, washed by the Light. This, at least, was something she could understand. Still, it sent a shudder of disgust through her own body. A feeling of vulnerability, having discovered something her Ghost could not fix. What if the bark kept growing inside her?

“I’m just glad you’re alive,” said her Ghost.

“Thank you.” Kass reached out cupped hands, cuddled the Ghost when he floated in. Pain still hovered, but it was receding. Ghost floated into the darkness on her left side.

“I’ll help you.” He spoke softly. “I’ll stay over here, let you know what’s happening.”

“You always do, my friend.”

Eris had begun to dunk bloody needles in a bucket of bright blue water.

“I’m not leaving yet,” Kass said.

It had been the right thing to say, because Eris turned from her work. “You will be shocked for some time. It will arise in terrible waves. And you will be all right. You will be beautiful.” She said it matter-of-factly. “Like the Speaker’s broken mask.”

She reached into the black space on Kass’ left side, and then the Guardian felt the clammy leather of Eris’ glove against her cheek and her forehead. Her thumb whisked over the white eye, smoothing it, not easing the pain but rending it less important. “We have done good work out of a terrible thing.” Eris sighed, tired, and removed her hand.

“Should I have told you she was going to do that?” said Ghost, suddenly and full of concern. “She helped me before, so I thought it was okay not to, but — ”

“I don’t mind.” Kass smiled for both of them. Eris would not accept comfort in return, she knew, although she wished she knew how to give it. Eris, all bundled in darkness and the dead, guiding her like a psychopomp to a new life.

Afterward they talked of the Void, safe, academic ideas about how the Light worked the way it did. The air eased between them, and the bark of the tree glimmered malevolently in the bright, bright light, and the seed did not grow further but stayed with her. The green X mark on her face, which Ghost carefully drew for her anew but which neither of them knew from whence its significance came, was gone. It had been forgotten in the frantic repairs to Kass’ cheeks.She did not grieve for it.

She would grieve for the eye fr a long time, but sitting beside Eris she understood some of the former Hunter’s reluctance to return to the Tower. There was an appeal in never letting the Vanguard look at what happened, never facing the fear or pity or misplaced praise. She would go back. The seed had not led to her death, after all. So she looked at the bounds of the tree and heard no whispers, no push of roots into dirt. Ghost scanned her, checking for any more new growth, and found none. The Seed of Silver Wings was gone, disappeared somewhere in the process of its own mysterious will, or dormant within her forever.

So much had spread from the Black Garden, that place at the beginning of time and the beginning of her own time. That plateau in the center, cut through with angular spiral stairs and roots, shaded and cool and so very green … Kass imagined herself and Eris walking there, outside of time. It was only a daydream — she had responsibilities to return to, and thought she would re-enter the world easier than Eris had, because of circumstance instead of character. For now, she convalesced beneath the Tree, sure that both she and Eris were, in a way they would one day have to resolve from a less violent angle, glad for the interruption.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was a long time in the brainstorming stage, and ranged in prospective lengths anywhere from 500 words to ... well, about where it is now. It started out as two separate fics, one about Kass losing her eye and another about Eris discovering that the research she did to create Dark-Drinker has something to do with the Tree. That latter didn't quite work out, because of what the Darkness and the Void and the Garden all canonically are, but it folded in here. There was also going to be more about Kass' relationship with her fireteams and how the Seed made her Light problems worse, but, well, done is better than perfect. This was always going to be a very long "here is why my character looks this way." 
> 
> Now, if only Destiny's CC was a little more obliging.


End file.
